If you were gripped by Apollo-as-Pythias questioning what justice requires after Simmea’s death and by Arete pushing back during the voyage to recover stolen art, you’ll be right at home with the Jesuit mission in The Sparrow. Father Emilio Sandoz’s encounter with the alien culture of Rakhat forces the same kind of searching, uncomfortable inquiry into moral responsibility and unintended harm that animates the arguments on the Just City’s ship and in its councils.

If the schism of the cities and the sea journey to reclaim art in The Philosopher Kings made you ponder how a ‘just’ society actually functions, The Dispossessed will resonate. Like the debates between Pythias, Maia, and Arete over what the cities owe each other, Shevek’s life between Anarres and Urras scrutinizes property, freedom, and obligation—less about gadgets, more about people, culture, and the fragile machinery of ideals.

If you loved seeing Athena and Apollo intervene directly in mortal arguments—and how their presence reframes ethics and history—Ilium turns that delight up to eleven. It fuses a reenactment of the Iliad with posthuman science, letting gods and advanced beings collide in ways that echo the Just City’s divine entanglements and its erudite nods to classical texts and ideas.

If the clashes between the splintered cities and the Remnant—especially the arguments over who ‘owns’ art and which laws bind whom—hooked you, A Memory Called Empire offers that same charged cultural friction. Mahit Dzmare’s struggle to keep her tiny station’s identity intact inside the seductive Teixcalaanli empire mirrors the Just City’s battles over assimilation, legitimacy, and the stories a civilization tells about itself.

If the way The Philosopher Kings weaves Socratic argument into a treasure-hunt voyage—Pythias debating Arete on virtue one moment, confronting the consequences of stolen masterpieces the next—made you light up, Palmer’s novel delivers a similar intellectual high. Mycroft’s confessional narration, political salons, and fierce disputes about providence and social order scratch the same itch for idea-dense storytelling with real plot momentum.